Call for Speakers

This Call for Speakers closed on midnight of July 15, 2013 (CEST).

We are inviting the CSS community to submit proposals for the upcoming CSSconf.eu (September 13, 2013, Berlin, Germany).

This is what we call a “Hybrid CFS”: If you think you have something great to talk about, tell us all about it and we’ll consider your entry. If you know someone who has something great to talk about, nominate them. And if you are interested in hearing about a particular topic, nominate the topic and we can try to find a match.

Topics

First and foremost, we’re interested in topics that make us go, “Oh, wow! Yes! Cool! That!”

If you need some suggestions to get your ideas flowing, we are particularly interested in:

Cutting-edge technological advances in the world of CSS or computer science in general, if somehow applicable to CSS
Crazy Ideas & Crazy Hacks
Improving CSS developers’ lives
Mobile CSS
CSS in a hostile environment
Tools & Workflow
Pre-processors
Crazy drawing with CSS
CSS for Games
Scale & Performance
The history and future of CSS
And finally: Whatever you want; this is your conference!

We Can Help

Not everybody is a natural talent on stage. Not everybody can produce kick-ass slide-decks. Not everybody is a live-demo god. Not everybody knows they have something great to talk about.

There are about a million reasons why you don’t consider yourself a speaker. We are here to prove you wrong. If all you have is a gut feeling that you should be on stage, we are here to reach out and help you to develop or hone the skills you think you lack to deliver a great presentation.

We are happy to brainstorm your interests to see if a great topic is hiding.
We are happy to connect you with experienced speakers to help prepare your submission.
We are happy to review and advise on how to produce a slide deck. If you aren’t feeling creative, you could just use the base template of e.g. reveal.js or deck.js.
If you need practice giving talks, get in touch. We can hook you up with local groups so you can practice in front of a friendly crowd.
Again, whatever else you might need, we’re here to help.

Get in touch: contact@cssconf.eu (just don’t use this to submit a proposal).

If you need more encouragement, check out Tiffany Conroy’s site We Are All Awesome. Tiffany is a JSConf EU co-organizer, and her site is full of great advice.

The Perks

If your proposal is selected, here’s what you will get:

Travel to Berlin covered. This usually means we pay for your plane or train ticket. We are happy to assist with booking your itinerary, but if you can do it yourself, we can focus on making the conference more awesome.
Entrance to the conference. We won’t be done with the speaker selections by the time tickets go on sale, so if you want to make sure you can attend, you may want to purchase a ticket regardless. If you get selected to speak and if you need to, we can refund your ticket, but if we don’t, we can spend more money on making the conference more awesome.
We cover your stay in Berlin in a fancy hotel near the venue (including free Wifi) for a day before and after the conference. If you want to stay longer, we can arrange things, just let us know. You will have to cover extra nights, though.

If your employer can cover your travel and hotel, we are happy to list them as an awesome company sponsor. The money we save will be used to make the conference more awesome.

You’re welcome to bring your family. If you need childcare, get in touch. We want to make your stay as enjoyable as possible.

The Selection Process

Here’s roughly how we select our speakers:

Anonymize submissions, so there is no bias toward the submitter—proposals are judged on their own merit.
Two rounds of voting:
1. The first round rates each talk on a scale from 1 to 10.
2. The top-N submissions are then rated again on a 3-point scale (“Good”, “Yay!”, “MUST HAVE!”).
De-anonymize so we can (finally) bias against speaker details. Based on our budget, we might opt for a local or at least closer-by (read: cheaper to transport) speaker.

We expect many more excellent submissions than we have speaking slots. This process helps us to select the best ones.

Guidelines

All talks are in English.

Talks are usually 30 minutes long (for longer talks we’ll get in touch with you directly). This includes 3-5 minutes of Q&A. We will be on a tight schedule and will enforce the end of a talk rigorously. We suggest timing your presentation in advance.

Make sure you care, and make sure we see you care. Typos, sloppy formatting and all-lowercase submissions make our reading of your proposal tedious. These things will definitely count against your proposal.

Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, we will ask you to slim things down. With the amount of submissions we get, the quicker you can to make a good impression the better.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” — Blaise Pascal

Original Topics. One of the things we want to do with CSSconf.eu is push the community forward. We can’t do this if the same people talk about the same things all the time. Thus, we favor original content. If you want to present a topic that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist or new research or development—something to make it unique.

Misc

We plan to record and publish all talks on the internet for free, along with a recording of the slide deck, live-demo, or other on-presenter-screen activity.

We do this for the benefit of the larger CSS community and those who can’t make it to the conference. We hope you want to help out, but if you are uncomfortable about this in any way, let us know and we will work things out.

Finally, since you retain full ownership of your slides and recording, we’d like to ask you to make your materials and recording available under a Creative Commons (we default to no commercial reuse) or other open source license.

Many thanks to JSConf EU for letting us borrow from their experience, process, and words.

We are proud to support and uphold the Conference Code of Conduct.